If you have not noticed already, I have recently uploaded my user review of Abomination: Nemesis Project. It is by far the longest user review that I had ever written, with the TXT file that I used to hold the text for the user review reaching a (relatively) gigantic 33 KB in size. To be honest, this astonished me, myself, personally.

Perhaps I should not have found this surprising; this is a game that I have been "itching" to replay for a long, long time. The first time that I had played it, when I was only a kid, I could barely comprehend how the game works. Older me had written this off with the assumption that I was not old and wise enough to understand the game, and so had made myself the promise that I would track down a copy of this game in the future and play this game to utter completion. Hence, this is the aforementioned "scratching of the old itch".

Those tentacles would do more than just tickle you - and once they are done, you will need more than a scratch for the "itch" that they cause.

There were other itches that I have managed to scratch. X-Com: Apocalypse was one of them, and scratching that itch was GREAT, despite flaws that the game has and its obvious but minor unfinished state. Coincidentally, I had played Nemesis Project for the first time after I had played X-Com: Apocalypse for the first time, so younger me was all too eager for this game, which was supposed to be a somewhat streamlined alternative of the X-Com games.

X-Com: Apocalypse was an itch for me too because I also could not understand much about the game at the time. It was terrifically complex for a kid like me; there are a lot of things that have to be juggled in-game, which I would not describe here (but I would direct you to my user review instead). It suffices for me to say that I eventually gave up on Apocalypse for the first time, largely due to my not being able to recognize that there are design shortcomings in that game at the time (namely how little documentation there was about the controls for micromanagement in that game).

Nevertheless, older me returned to the game, and had a great time, but not with a bit disappointment that the game was just not finished. Still, it is by far the best X-Com micromanagement game, at least for me. In other words, it was one heck of a great itch-scratching.

I have to admit here, however, that another itch simply surfaced. The X-Com series is just begging for another installment - and no, I do not want it to be this one, which I consider a tangential spin-off AT BEST. (Other more embittered fans of the X-Com franchise would have much, much harsher words for this upcoming shooter.)

That was one of the reasons that I bought Civilization V at launch, something that I rarely do as I prefer to wait for price drops (I am a very patient person). I made this reason, in the hope that Take-Two Interactive would see Firaxis as a profitable subsidiary, and would consider having Firaxis, whom I consider to be the most qualified (for now), develop a new micromanagement X-Com game.

(Sid Meier did have a hand in the X-Com games, though their most prominent designer was Julian Gollop, who sadly could not care less about the X-Com IP anymore and is - perhaps an even worse fact - working for Ubisoft now, and making 3DS Tom Clancy games, of all things that I had expected him to do post-X-Com other than rant about commercial greed ruining IPs, of which Ubisoft is ironically also accused of.)

Yet, for Take-Two to consider this, XCOM has to be successful commercially, if only for Take-Two to consider the X-Com IP as still profitable. With 2K Games in the helm for the development of this shooter, I have little doubt that it would be.

THIS - is just one of many, many screens in X-Com: Apocalypse.

Returning to the case of Abomination: Nemesis Project, I have to say here that it was unfortunately an itch which I should never have scratched.

Even though I was a kid, I did recognize that Nemesis Project was sort of a distilled version of the X-Com games. Its interfaces appear simpler, icons are larger and there were far fewer things to worry about. Therefore, younger me was eager to see if this game is more "accessible" than X-Com: Apocalypse was.

Unfortunately, this game doesn't tell the player a lot of important things; younger me blundered through the game, and almost always hit a game-over screen slightly more than half-way into the game, no matter how many game configurations that I tried. I remembered stopping just after a week of furious playing, and this fact had gnawed at me for years. It isn't nostalgia, I would say this now, but a sense of lingering dissatisfaction that I do not like to leave unfulfilled.

Huge icons would appear to be a heck lot clearer than the comparatively tiny icons to be had in the X-Com games, but it made scrolling through the list of icons a huge time-waster.

It is only recently that I managed to track down the game and play it once more. This time, I am much wiser and more experienced at how games are to be played. Unfortunately, I also found out that the true reason that I stopped was not because I was not prepared for this game, but that because this game has a mess for its implementation of ideas.

After having completed the game - and even managing to find someone for a quick multiplayer session (though this acquaintance was very, very reluctant to play the game, for good reasons that I found out to my dismay a bit later) - I am convinced that I had pretty much wasted my time on a game that could have been so, so much better than it was.

Hence, I have written an exceptionally long user review that, I have to admit, ribbed on just about any significant flaw to be had with the game. This is a game that I cannot recommend to anyone with an interest in micromanagement games.

I had scratched the itch that was this game into a painful sore.

This game very much reminded me of other itches that I had yet to scratch, but now simply refuses to scratch. These happen to be games that I simply gave up on, and they happen to be games that I recommend that you stay FAR away from, if you happen to have played these games before but stopped for a variety of reasons:

Timescape: Journey to Pompeii: For a fabled city, the Pompeii in this game is dead static. Most importantly, the game has serious stability issues at launch.

Beasts and Bumpkins: This is a micro-management game that has its gameplay designs quite busted. For example, a slight increase in the price of eggs for the player's "bumpkins" (that is, peasants) results in a spike in murders in the town under the player's control. Yes, I am not kidding.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent: This could have been a good game for me - but the PC version has very, very serious issues with ATI GPUs that stayed even years after its release.

Double Agent had plenty of other issues too.

Any Games that Have the Next-Generation Larry, i.e. Larry Lovage, in it: If Al Lowe, who is the creator of the Leisure Suit Larry series, refuses to even complete the Leisure Suit Larry games that did not have the grace of his hands, you know that they are bad.

The above list does not include all the games that I would not be returning to, but the full list is actually short. There are few games that can really rub me the wrong way, so you can be sure that the ones above are exceptional sources of pain.

That all said, I would LOVE to know if you have any itches that need scratching, e.g. games that you have yet to play sufficiently and would like to return to them.

Oh yes, to those who celebrate the turn of the Lunar Years, I wish that you had a happy Lunar New Year this 2011!

P.S. The lady above is obviously one of the characters whom I have used as a profile pic before. Like the rest, she is a character in an old and quite obscure Japanese video game IP that was once popular in Japan for dubious reasons. (And no, the game is not pornographic.)